If I want to stop my behavioral addiction on my own, what should be my first step?

If I want to stop my behavioral addiction on my own, what should be my first step?

Marc Kern (Addiction Expert, Director of Addiction Alternatives) gives expert video advice on: Can I stop my behavioral addiction on my own?; Where should you go for help with a behavioral addiction?; What does it mean to "hit bottom" in behavioral addiction? and more...

The answer to what your first step in stopping your behavioural addiction should be lies in the addiction itself. What is it all about? As we've spoken about before, the first thing I would recommend is, without shame, without blame, and without putting yourself down, stand back, get out a spreadsheet or a piece of graph paper and start to just graph how often and the frequency of when you engage in this particular behaviour. Beyond that, there's a substantial amount that you might do. That is, figure out what times you typically engage in the behaviour. If you look at an addict, generally speaking, they engage in their destructive behaviour in a slice of hours. Let's say 5:00 to 7:00, or early in the morning, or something like that. Those are the hours that the body has been taught (sort of like muscle memory) to go and to engage in these sort of behaviours, and the individual should try to find activities that are inconsistent with the destructive addictive behaviour. Another sort of strategy: they may go to the self-help book section at their local library or bookstore, they might go on the Internet and try to get some basic knowledge about what might be going on, they can consult a professional; a psychologist or a physician who is specializing in addiction. Let's just be frank. Most physicians have no idea about addictions. They have a very pessimistic view on being able to cure an addiction. So, you need to seek out somebody who really knows something about it, and don't be sort of duped just because they have the name “addiction specialist”; they may not know anything other than one philosophy of addiction recovery. An addiction specialist may only know 12-Step recovery. Another addiction specialist, like myself, only knows cognitive behavioural methods. So, you want to shop around, if that's how far you go, and look for methods that make sense to you; that you think you can integrate into your lifestyle, that your family can accept, and that you could hold onto well past sort of the action stage where you're actually doing something. This is a lifetime evolution you have to conceptualise. This is not a little sprint where you're just going to do a few little things here. This is sort of a reformatting of what I do this hour, that minute, when this happens. It's a way of coping in a much broader sense than you might expect; much broader than just the addiction itself.